philosophy of design; request for instruction

[test]

On Wed, 2020-06-10 at 11:06 -0600, Nick Wiltshire wrote:
> On Wednesday, June 10, 2020 7:40:51 AM MDT test wrote:
> > On Tue, 2020-06-09 at 19:32 +0200, Ian Douglas wrote:
> > > On Tuesday, 09 June 2020 15:38:18 SAST test wrote:
> > > > It depends on what you consider "robust".  My experience is that
> > > > Gentoos
> > > > package management is a nightmare, giving you mysterious error
> > > > messages
> > > > with every update that are impossible to understand and finally
> > > > leaves
> > > > you
> > > > unable to fix all the dependency problems it's running into because
> > > > they
> > > > are not fixable.  After a short while, you run into a dependency
> > > > loop
> > > > in
> > > > that you need to update stuff which needs to be updated before you
> > > > can
> > > > update, and at point, you have to reinstall from scratch.
> > > 
> > > YMMV, but I've been running Gentoo on assorted boxes since 2005 and
> > > have
> > > never
> > > had to re-install. Portage usually tells you what the problem is if
> > > there
> > > are
> > > dependency issues, and the forums help when you get stuck.
> > 
> > Yes, YMMV, but:
> > 
> > Who understands these messages and can figure out how to fix the
> > problems?
> >  I had to ask on the mailing list all the time and could only hope that
> > the
> > messages would go away after a while after more updates.  Some didn't
> > and
> > new messages kept coming on every update.
> > 
> 
> I understand them perfectly fine 99% of the time. When I don't the forums
> has 
> an answer. Or just remove the blockers manually and plow on.

That's amazing.  I usually didn't understand them, and the mailing list not
always had an answer.  That they were partly printed blue on black didn't
help, either.  Sometimes the answer was to wait until it may hopefully be
fixed some time eventually.  It's also not an option having to wait for
finding a solution on a mailing list that may take days or never to be
found while the server doesn't work.  Doing so can get rather expensive and
makes it inadvisable to update it to begin with.

And removing stuff, like perl, for example, isn't exactly an option when it
means that the server doesn't work anymore when perl is removed ...  Gentoo
itself probably doesn't work anymore when you remove perl, or does it?  The
same goes for emerge.

> > I was told that yes, the messages suck and there is no interest in
> > fixing
> > them because it's difficult.  I was told I need to update at least once
> > a
> > week to run into less problems with updating.  Seriously?
> 
> Not true at all. I have updated systems that were left in the corner
> doing 
> their thing for 2 years. With very little downtime I'll add.

Of course it's true.  It is what I was told, and if it's not, prove that it
isn't.

Anyway, you can probably tell me how to upgrade emerge when the dependency
required to update emerge can not be updated because emerge must be updated
before its dependency could be upgraded.

That's not a blocker that could be removed.  It's something that the
package maintainers messed up badly in that they didn't make sure that
everyone who happened not to update at exactly the right time had some way
to fix the problem when they updated only later.

> > Spending several hours on each update trying to fix the problems and
> > running the risk that things simply don't work anymore is not feasible.
> >  The idea of doing that once a week is ridiculous unless it's your full
> > time job maybe and when you have only one machine to deal with.  It's
> > not
> > an option to reboot the severs like every other week because you were
> > forced to update because otherwise they become impossible to
> > update.  It's
> > not even an option to reboot servers during working hours because it
> > means
> > that others can't work anymore, and spending the whole night trying to
> > fix
> > dependency problems isn't feasible, either, especially when things are
> > not
> > likely to work again in the morning.
> 
> There is literally no such thing as unable to update on Gentoo. Just
> because 
> you can't figure it out doesn't mean it's not possible.

It doesn't mean that it is possible, either.

It was suggested that it might perhaps be possible to revert to some
previous state of the repos after which it might perhaps be possible to
update, and that it could just as well screw everything up.  I had neither
the timely resources, nor the disk space to make an update of the whole
machine.  So it was impossible to update, and it clearly showed that Gentoo
is unsuited.

> I had an admin rm -rf /usr and I was able to recover it without a
> reinstall. 
> You can run emerge in a chroot with a fixed toolchain and install the
> packages 
> on your live system. That's "robust".

IIRC I never made binary packages on Gentoo that could be installed
somewhere else after compiling them.  The point of using Gentoo is that you
compile everything optimized for the machine it's running on rather than
dealing with binary packages.

And what would it have mattered?  Updates would have been nightmares every
time anyway --- and even worse because I would have needed to create and
install binary packages --- and it would have been impossible to update
nonetheless.

> > In the end, updating became entirely impossible because of a dependency
> > loop.  Gentoo means that you may be forced to reinstall all machines
> > after
> > your vacation is over because it has become impossible to update them.
> 
> Nope. Wrong. You simply didn't know how to fix it. I have had multiple
> Gentoo 
> installs outlive the hardware they were installed on the day of purchase.

see above

> Other distros mean you get to reinstall every 3-5 years regardless of if 
> things are going well or not. And you don't get to choose things like
> your 
> init system, which OP indicated was an issue.

Centos is good for 10 years.  If you don't need more recent versions of the
software, there is no reason to reinstall.  Fedora can be upgraded twice a
year, and there is no need to reinstall.  Debian can be upgraded as well
with no need to reinstall.  Being able to upgrade and _not_ reinstalling is
one of.  It sucks that Centos can't be upgraded, especially since it was
annouced that 7 will be upgradeable.  But then, Centos 7 has 4 years left,
so perhaps it will be upgradable by then.

Is there even a distribution that can't be upgraded, except Centos maybe?
 Even Windows can be upgraded now.

Debian has made announcments that you will be able to choose between
systemd as default and alternatives.  I can't tell if you can still do that
and I leave it to the OP to find out.

> There's even a guide that will help you update from 15+ years back if
> you 
> really wanted to....
> https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Upgrading_Gentoo#Upgrading_from_.28too.
> 29_old_systems

Thanks!

It leads to a page that says:

" Warning
The
 commands below might be incomplete and serve more as a guidance rather 
than work instructions. Unless the approach is clear, it might be faster
 to just backup the important files and re-install Gentoo."[1]


[1]: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Upgrading_Gentoo#Updating_old_systems

> > It was a nightmare I really don't need.  It is something that the OP
> > could
> > experience when he tries Gentoo.  Perhaps it helps him with making his
> > decision.
> 
> To each their own. I will not bother replying to this thread again as
> it's not 
> really the appropriate list, but felt the need to point out your
> absolutism of 
> "it didn't work for me, so it must be broken" is simply inaccurate.

Funny, I never said that.  I only described my experience and suggested
alternatives so it may help the OP to decide for himself what he wants to
do.

>  I admin 
> more than a dozen Gentoo boxes in production and only have to reboot 
> occasionally for kernel upgrades.

And because you say so, Gentoo always works flawlessly for eveyone under
all circumstances, no matter what.